![]() His Leonardo is a human being with foibles and frailties, whose great mind ultimately goes into a “tailspin” in his late drawings of an apocalyptic deluge: the intelligence that wondered at the miracle of creation took an almost crazed delight in the spectacle of destruction. Isaacson marvels at the infinite curiosity of a thinker who set himself to “describe the tongue of the woodpecker”, yet refuses to babble about genius as a supernatural gift. ![]() T he definite article in the subtitle of Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci: The Biography (Simon & Schuster £25.50) says it all – but why should the bestselling biographer of Benjamin Franklin, Einstein and Steve Jobs pretend to false modesty? Isaacson is uniquely well-equipped to write the definitive account of a universal man who was a painter and a musician, a scientific theorist and an engineer, a designer of military hardware and a theatrical impresario, and he makes Leonardo’s technological contraptions – a hoist, a perpetual-motion machine, a needle-grinder – seem every bit as fantastical as the effeminate saints and enigmatic sibyls he painted. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |